Re: Oracle on v40z vs Oracle on v490

On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 14:09:01 +0400, "Alexey Sergeyev" <saefido7_at_devexperts.com> wrote:

> At the moment we have several RAC systems (Sun Fire V440, 4xUltraSparc
>IIIi-1062 MHz each, Oracle 10.1.0.4, up to 6 nodes). We are going to upgrade
>that hardware, and have now two options: to use Sun Fire V40z with dual-core
>AMD Opteron CPU, or to replace theses boxes with Sun Fire V490 with
>UltraSparc IV+.
>
> Some time ago we tested Oracle on V20z (2xAMD 875, 2.2 GHz) in
>comparision with our V440s, and found out, that AMD system is almost three
>tims faster than a v440. So, if we use v40z with 4xAMD 880 (2.4 GHz), we can
>expect up to 5.4 times performance improvement (3 times per core, and
>multiply by 1.8 - the second cores "weight").
>
> But we know nothing about Oracle performance on UltraSparc IV+. SUN
>says, UltraSparc IV+ 1500 is UP TO 5 times faster than UltraSparc III. I've
>traied to find any real examples, but didn't find any... So i have two
>questions (really two blocks of questions :)) )

My experience with these machines has nothing to do with RAC.. but..

Back when I was looking to replace our aging Sparc II E4500, based on per CPU calculations from www.spec.org, it would seem that v40z (single core 852) would almost 8x faster (per CPU), other machines would lag behind.

Sun Microsystems Sun Enterprise 3500/4500	198	212	100%
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V40z (Opteron 852)	1558	1741	787%
Sun Microsystems Sun Fire V880 (1200MHz)	625	700	316%
Dell PowerEdge 6600 (3.0 GHz Xeon MP)		1379	1408	696%
Dell PowerEdge 3250 (1.5GHz/6MB, Itanium2)	1099	1099	555%

So we replaced 10 CPU Sparc II machines, by 4CPU AMD machines.. Even if v40z's were only 6x faster, v40z was supposed to behave like a 24CPU sparc II (10cpus 6x faster * 4/10 CPUs)

I must say we are extremely happy with 3xv40z's that we installed, together with an EMC CX500 array (although EMC is still evil). Server loads never go beyond 1-2, unless some batch jobs are running, batch job time completion has increased by a factor of X (5-10 times), and we didn't have a 'load' problem once due to CPU/memory bottlenecks yet (and Sept is one of the busiest times of the year for us, since we are a sports-related website, db is mostly "OLTP")

>
> If reliability and performance of an AMD system will be, at least, not
>worse, than the mentioned Sparc system, then v40z seems much more preferable
>for us - $40k per box looks much better than $90k for one UltraSparc box.
>

Also, I am not sure if your 'dual core' calculations are correct. For Sparc IV Sun it was bet 1.7 and 1.8, for AMD's it might be smaller, I remember reading 40-50% performance gain.

Anyway, I haven't seen any CPU ratings on Sparc iV+.. I kind of doubt they're 5x faster than Sparc III, but do also take into consideration Oracle pricing together with your hardware calculations (you want the fastest CPU's, that's why we went with single core)

I strongly advise getting a Sparc IV+ test box, or to get spec metrics from Sun.

.......
We use Oracle 8.1.7.4 and 9.2.0.6/7 on Solaris 2.7 and RH4 remove NSPAM to email Received on Thu Oct 27 2005 - 11:44:23 CDT